So much for viewing the cosmos. How much help is this in regard to one’s everyday conduct? Not a lot. But the little help it does give is crucial, because a religion that does not have a vision of the Universe and of man’s place in Nature is just a sect, and obviously so. It fails completely to provide a way of life for the individual as a member of society. The only vision of the Universe that is acceptable nowadays is that of science, which alone has revealed the scale of its size and the time during which it has evolved. So any religious view that the Universe was created by a benign Creator, must absorb all scientific thought into its vocabulary, just as St. Augustine absorbed Neo-Platonic thought into Christian theology, and probably set the intellectual tone of Christendom for the next thousand years. That is exactly what I have done in regard to science. In my “Reconciliation of Science and War”, I assumed from the start that the truth of science had equal validity with the truth of religion. And that is the equivalent of absorbing the whole of science into the theology of the C.of E. Without this, in Christendom you are left with the “clap-happies” who ask the whole time, “What would Jesus have done?”, the evangelicals who rely on Biblical truth which has been heavily criticised, and traditional church-going which is declining in numbers. About other religions, I can only say that it is unconvincing to say that your God created the heavens and the earth, unless you reconcile this with scientific truth; and dangerous to dodge this issue by preaching that all those outside your religion are inferior to all those within.
A classic example of the danger of calling others “inferior” was Hitler’s view that Slavs were “unter-menschen”. To start with, the German invasion of Russia in 1941 was unbelievably successful; General Guderian said that women came to the very battlefield with bread and butter and eggs, and refused to let him move on until he had eaten. They regarded the Germans as liberators; and Germany was presented on a plate with the chance to defeat Russia in the only possible way, namely by tearing Russia apart from within. Then along came Himmler with his Sicherheitsdienst, who with their cruelty saved the Bolshevik State, and made the ultimate defeat of the Wehrmacht in Russia possible. If Hitler had not regarded Slavs as “unter-menschen”, the odds were surely in favour of his winning; there was no hope of Britain defeating Germany if Russia went down? I suspect the same remorseless logic applies to those religions which regard those outside their membership as “inferior”; you make so many enemies, that in effect you sign your own death-warrant.
But to return to everyday conduct, it is right that a breathtaking world view is not a lot of help in deciding how to behave. It may lift the spirits; but for most of the time one has to follow convention.